Poetry for Students Vol. 10

24 Poetry for Students

son to Whitman, a Library Journal reviewer

summed up Rukeyser’s career in a way that reflects

on the meaning and method of “Ballad of Orange

and Grape”: “Her muse demanded that she pay as

much attention to the shared, literal world as the

world of literature, so, like Whitman, she person-

alized the public events of her time.”

Criticism.

Sarah Madsen Hardy

Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English lit-

erature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the

following essay, she discusses Rukeyser’s ideas

about the relationship between language, power,

and morality in “Ballad of Orange and Grape.”

In “Ballad of Orange and Grape,” Muriel

Rukeyser suggests that a hot dog vendor’s indif-

ference to language when he pours an orange drink

into a machine labeled “grape” and grape drink into

a machine labeled “orange” is part of a larger moral

problem. For her, social ills in the East Harlem

neighborhood of which she writes can be attributed

to people’s lack of faith in the meaning of language.

In this atmosphere of lost faith, morally loaded cat-

egories that should be distinct, such as “war and

peace” and “love and hate,” start to blur. Without

going so far as to comparethe two acts, Rukeyser

connectsthem using the wrong word to connote

acts of physical violence. The prevalence of real,

physical violence named in the poem’s last stanza,

“rape, forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,” can be

related to the casual, everyday ’violence’ that peo-

ple like the hot dog vendor do to language. This

seems like a polemical claim, perhaps even a hy-

perbolic one. This essay explores and questions the

ideas about language, power, and morality that

Rukeyser voices in “Ballad of Orange and Grape.”

Rukeyser, who was born during World War I

and came of age during World War II, was sensi-

tive to violence in all its forms. Her life spanned

much of the century and she saw herself as a

spokesperson of causes surrounding its crises. In

another work entitled “Poem” dated from the 1940s

she states, “I lived in the century of world war.”

Rukeyser was a well-known pacifist, and her strong

leftist political views grew out of a sense of out-

rage at the violence of the times in which she lived.

Though “Ballad”’s setting is portrayed in specific

detail and can be connected to specific biographi-

cal facts of her life, Rukeyser describes the events

of the poem in sweeping terms as taking place “in

the twentieth century.” The shocking violence of

the World Wars of Rukeyser’s childhood and

youth—experienced by her and other Americans at

an arm’s length, mediated by press reports—shaped

her view of morality and her understanding of the

power of language. It is through this lens that she

observes East Harlem of the 1970s in “Ballad.”

Rukeyser saw her lifelong commitment to

pacifism as inextricable from her work as a poet.

Though Rukeyser was affiliated with Marxism and

the Proletariat School of Poetry in the earliest part

of her career, she soon broke off from any specific

school of political thought or poetic style to exhort

readers in her own individualistic voice. Louise

Kertesz, who wroteThe Poetic Vision of Muriel

Rukeyser(1980), one of the first book-length stud-

ies of her work, describes how Rukeyser bucked

all of the dominant trends in modern poetry—irony,

alienation, and an increasing interest in form—to

write out of a highly personal mission of meaning,

hope, and social change. Kertesz quotes Rukeyser,

writing in the wake of the discovery of the con-

centration camps at the end of World War II, de-

scribing the poet’s role on the world stage: “The

war for those concerned with life, the truth which

is open to all, is still ahead. It is a struggle in which

poetry also lives and fights.”

This vision of the poet as a fighter is one that,

Kertesz argues, “explains the remarkable thrust of

her work to the present.” As a pacifist, Rukeyser

participates in the century’s wars with a pen rather

than a sword. In “Poem,” Rukeyser goes on to de-

scribe the poet’s task in this century of world war.

She has a heroic vision of her vocation that can be

traced back to Whitman—a belief that the poet be-

longs in the public sphere, speaking and writing in

an emphatic voice that people can understand and

to which they respond more emotionally and

morally than intellectually or aesthetically. “In the

day I would be reminded of those men and women

/ Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, /

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost

unimagined values,” she writes in “Poem.” It is the

poet’s job, according to Rukeyser, to use language

in a way that fosters meaning and creates new pos-

sibilities for change and hope—or, as she writes in

the same poem, “to construct peace, to make love.”

To do less—to use language in a way that nullifies

meaning—is a form of destruction that colludes

with the forces of violence and exploitation. And

for Rukeyser, such forces are always readily and

Ballad of Orange and Grape